


We've Made Some Messes

by twice_royal



Series: All My Pieces [1]
Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Morning After, Not Actually Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 17:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5056912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twice_royal/pseuds/twice_royal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Whoops,” Kate says.</p><p>Clint lets out a groan and covers his face. He didn’t need to read her lips for that one. Right now, he feels that sentiment deeply in his soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We've Made Some Messes

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place sometime in Fraction's run but please don't think too hard about the timeline. (I didn't.)

Clint wakes up at eleven the next day, white summer sunlight slanting through the curtains onto the bed. He rolls over, rubbing his eyes.

“Whoops,” Kate says.

Clint lets out a groan and covers his face. He didn’t need to read her lips for that one. Right now, he feels that sentiment deeply in his soul.

After a couple moments, he reaches over to bedside table where he’d sleepily deposited his hearing aids the night before. There was no point in delaying it. Kate is saying things and he is half blinded by the sun.

“-- right. Okay.” Kate pushes the covers off her feet and swings herself upright, glancing around the room. Her clothes don’t appear to be on this floor. Clint has a pretty good idea where they are now that his brain is working a little more. It doesn't make him feel any better.

“I’m going to make coffee and then we can talk about this like adults.”

“Kate –“

“Nope.” She pops the ‘p’ as she descends the stairs of the loft without looking back. “Coffee first.”

Clint considers the merits of pretending his hearing aids have run out of battery and staying right where he is until Kate leaves and _then_ pretending this never ever happened. It was not a very good plan. One, Kate was not going to leave until she wanted to, and if she got it in their head that they were going to talk this out then she wasn’t going to leave until they did. She practically lived here these days, anyway.

Two, he’s _starving_.

Clint lets out a long sigh and then rolls out of bed. “Easy on the water. You always put too much in.”

“No, I don’t. Normal humans drink their coffee as a liquid, not whatever sludge you make.” Kate’s in the kitchen, and she’s found a shirt.

“That’s _my_ shirt,” he protests, picking up his jeans from where they’re lying halfway down the stairs. He suddenly has a vivid memory of tripping and almost falling on his face while taking them off last night. Awesome. Great. This was just getting better and better.

“Yeah,” Kate agrees, sticking the pot into his coffee maker and pressing a button. It begins burbling gently.

“Am I going to get it back?”

“Later,” she says dismissively, turning and leaning on the counter.“ Do you have any clean mugs?”

“Uh,” he says, dragging his eyes up from where they had landed on the hemline of his t-shirt, which happened to be halfway up her thigh. “Check the cabinets.”

Kate looks amused, but she lets it slide (thank God) without comment. Clint shakes his head firmly and pulls open the fridge. He needs to do something. Doing things is infinitely better than sitting here and dwelling on his epically poor decision-making skills. Nice, Clint. _Whoops_ didn’t begin to cover this one.

He scans the contents of his refrigerator – luckily, he’s just gone grocery shopping. He’s got eggs, he’s got bacon. He has potatoes too, but the last time he tried to make hash browns he set off the smoke alarm. Eggs and bacon it is.

“You don’t have clean mugs,” Kate informs him. “You don’t have any mugs, actually. How does this keep happening to you?”

“Natasha stole one last time she was here,” he says defensively, reaching to get a frying pan from a cabinet. To be fair, though, he’d stolen it from her first. “Did you check the dishwasher?”

“I didn’t know you had a dishwasher.” But she doesn't add anything else, so he assumes she found some. He’s devoting his concentration to the eggs. Clint is actually really good at eggs. Possibly because eggs are really difficult to screw up. But still.

The eggs are successful, and the bacon turns out…all right. He divides them into two plates and sets one in front of where Kate is sitting cross-legged at the kitchen island. She’s already started in on the coffee. Her hair is gathered up in a loose bun-type thing on top of her head, her mascara is smudged at the corner of her eyes, and she’s wearing a moth eaten t-shirt that he’s had for ten years. Somehow, this all looks _good_ , like it was perfectly orchestrated for a photoshoot or something. She looks fantastic. Clint, on the other hand, hasn’t shaved and probably looks like he’s around fifty six years old.

“Thanks,” Kate said, picking up the fork.

He nods, leans back against the counter and starts working at his eggs with single-minded concentration. If Kate was the one that wanted to talk about this, she could start. He was going to eat his eggs until further notice. And if they didn’t talk about this ever again, then, well –

“So, we had sex,” Kate says casually, before biting into a piece of bacon.

“Yep,” Clint agrees after a few moments, because that had definitely happened. “Sorry,” he adds.

Kate narrows her eyes at him. “Why are you apologizing?”

“Because…” It seems like there are probably a lot of reasons he should apologize for this. “Because I said I didn’t want to sleep with you. And I meant it.” And at the time, he really had. Honestly. At some point between then and now, things had shifted, but there was no reason she had to know that. As far as he was concerned, that had been a promise. He had so few relationships that he hadn’t screwed up.

And he really, really hadn’t wanted to screw this one up. Kate deserved better than him. The whole point of this - this whole thing that they had - was making her a better Hawkeye than he ever would be. He’d never had someone to teach him a lot of the things he ended up learning the hard way. No one to look up to, no one to call him on his shit, no one to tell him what’d he’d done right. He’d spent a lot of time figuring those things out on his own – how to be a good superhero, a good archer, a good (or at least a _relatively_ good) person.  
  
Then there was Kate. He and Kate were made of the same _stuff._ It was hard to explain, but it went deeper the archery and the codename. There was something that drove both of them to – well, do incredibly stupid things in the hope of maybe doing some good.

But Kate didn’t have his baggage. Kate was bright, talented, smart, young. Kate could be really damn good if she got the chance. And she didn't need to do it alone.

But sleeping with her? That was not going to help. That just made everything complicated.

“Well, you definitely wanted to sleep with me last night,” Kate said, and he wasn’t sure if he was imagining the slight irritation in her voice.

“That was a mistake,” Clint said, a lifetime of lying making his voice smooth, almost offhanded. Almost.

“A mistake,” Kate repeated, and he wasn’t imagining it, her voice had gone flat.

“It wasn’t bad,” he added quickly. It had been the _exact_ opposite of bad, actually. At the time, at least. “It was. Uh. Not bad. That’s not it.”

“Then,” Kate said, deliberate and slow. He knew that tone of voice. He’d heard it from Bobbi, from Nat, from Jess. It was the _Clint-fucked-up voice_. _Clint-fucked-up-and-he-doesn’t-know-exactly-how-so-I-need-to-elaborate-in-short-syllables_ , to be exact. “What exactly is _it_?”

Kate, he knew, was not going to see things the same way as he was. Because Kate was bright and smart and _young_ , Kate tended to think she had more figured out than she actually did. That was part of themselves that they shared; Clint knew enough to admit that. But there was something to be said for experience. This exact situation was unique, yeah, but Clint did have a lot of experience with sleeping with people he shouldn’t have. And experience had taught him that moving on as quickly as possible before shit got _too_ weird was a solid course of action.

“It’s…” There were so many other things Clint wished he could be doing right now. “Adrenaline makes people do weird things? We both had a near death experience, got a little confused, and we. Did some things. It’s a reasonable reaction. But this isn't who we are to each other, right?”

This was, at best, total bullshit. Clint hadn’t been confused. He distinctly remembered the heat of Kate next to him on the couch, eating a slice of pizza absently, neither of them really watching the television. (Sometimes when aliens blow up the building you thought your friend/partner/protégé/??? was in and then you run into her fifteen minutes later and find out she though you were in there, the only thing both of you can think to do is stumble back to your apartment and order a pizza.)

He also remembered Kate moving closer, and a traitorous little voice in the back of his head hoping that she was going to kiss him. And then being glad when she did. And then kissing her back. And then –

“Sure, Clint,” Kate says, her alarmingly bright tone snapping him back into the present. “We just got a little confused.”

There’s an edge to her voice now, jagged and sharp like broken glass. Clint is taken aback by its coldness. 

Kate has a terrifyingly calm face on right now as she sets down her plate and coffee. “I’m gonna go. Don’t forget to take the dog out or he’ll pee on your carpet again.”

Way to go, Clint.

So Kate leaves. Clint is left with a pot of coffee, dirty dishes, and a dog who needs to relieve himself. He takes care of the dog, then the dishes, then downs the rest of the coffee straight from the pot, unable to shake the feeling that by trying to control the damage he had somehow managed to make things much worse.

**Author's Note:**

> A fun fact: the working title for this series' playlist was "MASSIVE MISTAKES" and you can listen to it right [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/grayicedtea/playlist/7reOGsgxecgRojlqeO0Xv4). Also, come say [hi](http://www.twice-royal.tumblr.com)!


End file.
